Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
This article owes much to the suggestions of colleagues and findings of research assistants. Thoughtful and thorough peer reviewers, including Michael J. Kramer who revealed his identity, tested my analysis and interpretation. My Michigan colleagues Charles Garrett, Martha Sprigge, and Bruce Conforth commented on drafts and Stephanie Heriger and Meredith Rutledge-Bourger from Cleveland's Rock Hall assisted in locating a vital recording as well as navigating photo permissions with the Hendrix Estate. Most importantly, then graduate student Michael Mauskapf and undergraduate research assistant Steven O'Neill worked with me to locate the many bootleg recordings that form the archive of this project, while Nathan Flanders helped trace accounts of Hendrix's Woodstock Banner in rock magazines.
The [Hendrix] "Star Spangled Banner" is probably the most complex and powerful work of American art to deal with the Vietnam War.
--Charles Shaar Murray1
For Jimi, it ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] was a musical exercise, not a manifesto.
--Charles Cross2
His National Anthem. . . is meaningless and constitutes the cheapest kind of sensationalism.
--Pete Johnson (Los Angeles Times)3
Jimi Hendrix's 1969 performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair has been interpreted as perhaps the most powerful symbol of rock's potential for protest. Although not particularly controversial in the immediate aftermath of the festival, Hendrix's Woodstock Banner has been ever more deeply inscribed in U.S. cultural memory--propelled by commemorative recordings, tribute performances, and especially the 1970 documentary film Woodstock.4Yet its status as legend also serves to obscure. Myth results in both an exaggeration of the Woodstock Banner's influence as well as a fundamental misunderstanding--and possibly a gross underestimation--of Hendrix's art as political commentary.
Rather than a single, ecstatic improvisation, Hendrix's Woodstock Banner is more revealingly thought of as part of a simmering process of mourning, celebration, critique, and activism brought forth in more than sixty performances, spanning August 1968 (over a year before Woodstock) to August 1970 (a month before the guitarist's death). 5A broader analysis reveals Hendrix's Banner--as I will refer collectively to his many performances of the anthem--as sonic snapshots, taken repeatedly and often to catalog the state of the nation and to call for change. During a period fraught...